Publications

Valuing Primary Schools in Urban China

with Jimmy Chan, Zhi Wang, Qinghua Zhang and Xian Fang, Journal of Urban Economics, January 2020

We study the effect of school quality on housing prices in urban China. Our objective is to provide an estimate of the school quality premium based on the best available data. To account for unobserved neighborhood characteristics, we adopt the boundary-discontinuity design of Black (1999) and the matching strategy proposed by Fack and Grenet (2010). The results suggest that parents value public primary schools that have outstanding records in academic tournaments. The school-quality premium is highly non-linear. While a tournament superstar—a school above the 90th percentile in tournament performance—causes housing prices in its neighborhood to increase by 14 percent, or about 430,000 RMB ($ 60,648), the price difference between non-superstar schools is small.

Graphs of education in China

Working Papers

The Unintended Effect of Medicaid Aging Waivers on Informal Caregiving

(with Yinan Liu )

Does Aging at Home Make Older Adults Healthy: Evidence from Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services

(with Yinan Liu )

The Effect of the Partnership Long-Term Care Insurance Program on Private Insurance and Employment

(with Yinan Liu )

The Role of Supply Responses in Public Insurance Expansion: Evidence from China’s New Cooperative Medical Scheme

(with Lin Lin)

Are the Grandparents Alright? The Health Consequences of Grandparental Childcare Provision (with Peter Eibich)